


Value

by Hopie (hopiecat)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-10
Updated: 2013-09-10
Packaged: 2017-12-26 06:00:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/962447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hopiecat/pseuds/Hopie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Where Dean did the porn circuit way back and Castiel finds out about it during the end-of-days. You know, he thinks there should've been a moratorium on girl talk during the apocalypse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Value

**Author's Note:**

> Because Kat got me into Supernatural and I couldn't get this slightly AU-ish image out of my head. Comments and critique really welcome, though my e-mail is crap and I might not answer all of them immediately.

The end-of-days were a lot more boring than he’d anticipated. In the Book of Revelations, the copy that Sam had painstakingly downloaded and printed out in two-by-two visits to several different copy shops, they made the apocalypse out to be this big, terrifying event: fire raining from the Heavens, angels and demons in a cage fight with the ref getting paid by both sides to throw the match, crops dying, locusts, the death of the first born, and a partridge in a pear tree for good measure. He’d expected some kind of interdimensional Die Hard sequel, where the endgame was nobody got to jump out of a flatlining helicopter. 

Instead, it was a lot like a game of chess, and there was a lot of waiting. Incidentally, chess had been invented by some sad nerd to spice up his Saturday nights, and now that his Saturday nights consisted of listening to his brother and/or talking to the world’s weirdest friendly neighbourhood angel, chess, on paper, was a smorgasbord of fun. 

Dean pushed the paper he was reading away from him and rubbed his eyes, pretty sure he’d read that exact same page in this exact spot about three weeks ago. 

“I’m getting a beer – you want one?” he asked Sam, off in his weird little studying heaven of books and papers and cross-referencing. His side of the table looked worse than a bomb in a book factory. He’d underlined things. In highlighter. In different colours. 

Shaking his head, Dean looked at his one and only page of notes, a single sheet which he couldn’t even read, scrawled indefinably across faint lines. 

Oh, well. He was more the shoot-it guy than the research worm. 

Pushing himself up, Dean sauntered into the kitchenette to get himself a beer, and on his way there, he passed by the couch where Cas was riveted to the television screen, watching something with complete and rapt attention. Dean glanced at it, carelessly, and his brain promptly thunked out of his skull when he saw himself on-screen. 

Well, it wasn’t exactly himself. He’d aged since Hot College Boys do Pizza (the sequel better than the original, like all classics, but that was so not the point).

Dean breathed in, first sharp and short, then longer, until his lungs ached, and his words exploded out of him, “Cas!”

Cas jumped, and looked around at him with guilt written into the lines of his face, and he was an angel, so it wasn’t like he could hide it or anything and neither, because Dean’s life was a mess and God was laughing at him, could he hide what Dean was fairly goddamn certain was a hard-on.

“You don’t watch porn,” Dean said, proud of himself because hey, his voice was steady and this wasn’t weird at all, “when other people are in the room. Turn that off.” 

Cas looked at the screen reluctantly, and picked up the remote. Years, hot, sweating, oh-God-my-brother-could-see-this years, inched past while Cas deliberated on which button to press, and when the screen finally clicked off, Dean breathed a sigh of relief and decided to upgrade his beer to whiskey. 

He walked away, but Cas’ eyes stayed on him, following him into the kitchen and out through the door. 

They were in one of those crappy pay-by-night hotels, with a neon sign a topless woman away from being a seedy love-in and a parking lot empty except for a handful of cars that looked like they’d grown into the ground, and the night was quiet. When all of this had started, nights had changed – everything had changed, but nights even more. It was like someone had turned this section of the day on mute so that, no matter when he walked outside, he heard nothing. Not a car backfiring, not traffic, not the guy in the room next to his arguing with his girlfriend. Nothing. 

He missed it, the noise and the chaos and life, but—

Dean stiffened. To his right, the air shifted and stretched as Cas appeared next to him. 

“…. Dean?” said the angel, slowly, his name a question mark. 

“What?”

Castiel shifted closer and the trench-coat rustled, and Dean felt the air wobble uncertainly, and anticipated what Cas was going to ask. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said, “not ever.” 

The angel didn’t do so well with ‘no’. 

This time, he seemed to understand. Maybe being around humans was rubbing off on him. He already seemed to realize that it was considered rude to walk into the bathroom when someone else was in there (yes, Cas, even if you have something important to say) and that you should tip the waitress when eating out, and that you should never touch a man’s car. ‘No’, on that note, wasn’t the hardest concept to get. 

“Is it…” and, whoops, too late, he’d overestimated Cas, “…a bad thing? What you were doing?”

Dean stopped with the whiskey glass halfway to his mouth and how, how was this his life? Why was he the designated angel tutor for the night? Could he not say anything---no, Cas would ask Sam and then Sam would find out and that, that was not a conversation they’d be having any time soon. 

“It’s not a good thing,” said Dean, and drank. 

Cas waited quietly while he did, half an inch too close. 

“It’s something I did to get money,” said Dean, “because I needed money and because I like sex. I’m good at sex.” He shrugged, “so it seemed like a good idea. I had the look for it, and the dough could get us places, and it’d keep me from sleeping on the streets. Not a bad trade-off.” 

Cas nodded, and tilted his head thoughtfully to one side, “… then why,” he said, “do you sound so angry?”

“I’m not,” said Dean, and knocked his last gulp of whiskey back like a shot of vodka. 

“Okay,” said Dean, not mellowed, but tired, so tired, “I am.”

Talking to Cas was a 50-50 chance of getting to a point where you either hated him or you hated yourself, and most nights, Dean wanted to strangle Cas for several things. Tonight, Cas wasn’t even in the top 10 of ‘shit he hated’, #1 being this conversation, #2 being that he had to do that because he was a dumbass little shit who’d never finished highschool. 

“You are angry,” Cas observed, “and sad. Is it because of the—“ the word odd on his tongue, he struggled with it, and, “porn?” Jesus Christ, an angel had said ‘porn’ and not even one measly bolt of lightning; the Old Testament was full of it. 

And he wasn’t angry. 

“Look, Cas,” he said, “when you get to that point? Where you’re so …. Goddamn dumb that that’s all your good for? Not a good feeling.” This didn’t seem like something he should be telling him – Cas didn’t get a lot of things, humans part of all that, and hey, it didn’t matter. Apocalypse coming in hard and fast, not a lot of time to regret it. “I did it because I’m too dumb—“

A movement, controlled, powerful, ripped the air in two between them, and in a low, firm voice, like someone had poured a thundercloud into a mason jar, Cas said, “you are not dumb.”

Dean turned his head to look at him, and he hadn’t seen him before, not this close, kept away from that just because it was not his style, and man, the effect up close was intense. 

Cas was half-an-inch closer than too close, and in the dark of a flickering overhead light, he stood alone and unyielding and occupying a space larger than the one Dean could see and, he swore, when the light kept going on and off, he saw wings and height and something else where Cas was; something bigger and stronger, that sank into him and yanked his belly into his throat, yanked his knees down to the ground. He stood his ground, somehow.

And then there were Cas’ eyes, blue eyes, human eyes, and not human at all, because nothing human, nothing, could look pure from the inside and filled with energy like that, and he wondered how people looked at Cas and didn’t see what he was, didn’t guess. His vessel, ad space salesman, it fit the picture; his eyes, they were the eyes of things that humans had feared when they were still painting on walls with mud and clay and hunting down furry elephants. 

Dean’s tongue curled down his throat and disappeared, and he had nothing more to say. 

“You are,” Cas reached out, and his touch, his fingertips, were warm when they should’ve been sticky or cold or just anything but warm, “brave. And strong. And right. Just.” 

No, thought Dean, shaking because it was cold, not because he was some pansy and definitely not because of Cas, I’m not. “You’re drunk.”

Cas made a sound, waves and a typhoon and a lighthouse all meeting together in one devastating accident, and he leaned forward, and Dean watched those blue eyes come closer and felt like he should run, just run, turn tail and flee because what was coming for him could tear him to pieces and only a stupid man stood still and let it and he flinched back, just a step, that was all he managed. 

The angel’s hand closed around the side of his face, and he rested his forehead against his shoulder, all weight and energy and sparking light. 

Well. 

Well.

Dean had never anticipated becoming an angel stand. He stared down at Cas’ shoulder, mind thrown together, the edges of a panicky, nervous energy burning a hole through his shoes and his fingertips, and something else whispering to him, just rest, just rest, just rest. 

“Are you going to tell Sam?” Dean blurted. 

Cas shook his head. He didn’t move. He should really move.

“…I wish I could show you,” Cas said sadly, “what I see. So you could believe me. … But you wouldn’t, would you?”

“Cas,” said Dean, glancing all around them, “how much did you drink?”

“I did not,” said Cas, and he pulled back, crestfallen, “you just don’t believe me. You never believe me.” A scary note of finality lined his words, and that flickering light showed the wings receding, curling into him, a bird about to take off. 

Dean stepped closer, not sure why. “…Hey,” he said, and he thought about a second word. 

Except Cas got there before him, and warmth wrapped around him, from top to toe, and it lasted a minute, maybe less than that, but everything evened out for that minute. He was safe. He was worth something. There was darkness, and he was protected in it. 

When it faded, Dean stuffed his hands into his pockets to keep them from shaking, and Cas unwrapped his arms from around him, and stepped back apologetically. 

They stared at each other, Cas unblinking in that completely creepy angel way of his, Dean in a less creepy and humane way, and then dean muttered, “fuck,” because it was always good to enunciate a bad idea before you jumped head first into it, and he kissed him. 

He’d always wanted – in the back of his head – to have a kiss like the movies, where the music cut out and the happy ending was practically written right there and then even if there was an hour, plus intermission, to get through. This wasn’t one of those kisses, because he could still hear the oppressive silence digging into the air around them, and he couldn’t seem to kiss Cas the way he wanted to without bumping teeth, then noses, then tongues. 

It was a pretty goddamn incredible kiss anyway. Cas, he discovered was a biter. 

Cas’ arms wrapped around him again, and the warmth came back, and so did the dark, and just then, he was worth something.


End file.
